Dominion From Sea To Sea Part 4

Water Running into Money.

While Mulholland stayed out in the field and drove his men relentlessly through six years of construction, living and working with them, Lippincott became an a.s.sistant chief engineer for the city and Eaton was still hoping to get a million dollars for i2,ooo acres of the land he bought up in Long Valley, along the line of the 235-mile aqueduct. Mulholland simply refused to meet his price, marking the end of their close friendship. Finally the moment came: November 5, 1913: the invitations to the celebration likened the project to "Caesar and his Roman Aqueduct," a huge crowd gathered, cannon boomed, and Mulholland had his men lift the gates that finally brought the Owens River to the city. As the water crashed out of the long spillway, Mulholland remarked, "There it is. Take it."16 He and the oligarchs, like Roman and Chinese emperors, had deployed water and earth into the power to found a great city, enough for a tenfold increase in population; they had built the future. The future was yet to come, however. The enormous surplus water (eight times what the city needed in 1913) had to go somewhere-and so it did: into a vast expansion of nearby towns and cities. Mulholland was happy to sell cheap water to any community, so long as it was willing to join the city-you "bring the water to L.A. and L.A. to the water," as Noah Cross put it. Los Angeles annexed the San Fernando Valley in 1915, doubling its size to 285 square miles (the city's "Louisiana Purchase"); by 1930 it had 442 square miles, "the largest metropolitan territory under a single government in the United States," big enough to plunk down Boston, San Francisco, and the five boroughs of New York, a kind of city-state dominating all of Southern California.17 The Panama Ca.n.a.l opened a year later, which favored L.A. compared to San Francisco and finally prompted it to build a deepwater harbor, at San Pedro; just 70 miles off the great circle route between Panama and Asia,'8 the port flourished, and by 1924 it was the leading port in tonnage on the Pacific Coast. Water again: it was everywhere.

If Robert Towne's narrative of Mulholland's aqueducts and dams collapses history, it doesn't violate the essential truth of what happened. But it does suggest that the skullduggery central to turning the San Fernando Valley into a real estate bonanza was somehow unique to Los Angeles, when it was merely grander in scale than the speculation all along the westering frontierand almost standard operating procedure in California. George Chaffey, for example, developed plans in the i89os to bring Colorado River water to the barren Imperial Valley, through a rudimentary 5o-mile-long ditch capable of irrigating a million acres of public land. Then mostly a desert, this valley in the southeastern corner of the state is about 45 miles long and 30 miles wide. It has the longest growing season in the United States (300 days), twice as much cotton per acre grows there compared to the rest of the country, and farmers can harvest six crops of alfalfa annually. Chaffey used the Homestead Act and the Desert Land Act of 1877 to get a lot of that public land free or for the modest sum of $1.25 an acre, which could be reclaimed once irrigation was completed; the water of the Colorado River, of course, was also free for the taking. After the ditch started filling, he and his a.s.sociates established the Imperial Land Company and began selling off real estate at huge multiples of what they paid for it (if they paid anything). They took settlers through the necessary procedures to get their land bought and irrigated, providing 6 percent mortgages and long-term water contracts that locked in permanent profits far beyond what was realized in the initial sales. The Mediterranean metaphors of Southern California real estate boosters didn't work so well in this desert, however, so Egypt came to mind: the Colorado was the Nile, the Imperial Valley was the Delta, behold the biblical lands and the desert coming to life, even the Pharaohs. But Chaffey was the real Pharaoh of this scheme, Starr wrote, "a ma.s.sive use of public resources for private profit."19 Mulholland's aqueduct snakes across the desert toward Los Angeles. Lippincott Collection, Water Resources Center Archives, University of California-Berkeley.

Wasn't San Francisco thirsty, too? The Hetch Hetchy Valley sits about 20 miles northwest of Yosemite, about half its size but its equal in beautyalthough much more remote and inaccessible. John Muir, the great environmentalist who had been instrumental in getting Congress to make a national park of Yosemite, and his Sierra Club friends were among the few people to have seen it. Through the valley ran the Tuolumne River, and San Franciscans wanted its water-delivered through a i5o-mile-long aqueduct. Bringing the water to the city paralleled the story of the Los Angeles aqueduct: a city engineer in San Francisco, Michael O'Shaugnessy, drove the endeavor like Mulholland in Los Angeles, and he also joined together with a former mayor, James Duval Phelan, the Fred Eaton of this project.20 Otherwise the drama was rather different: only one man really profited by putting arid land aside to wait for the oncoming, nourishing water, the San Francisco elite did not intrigue and scheme, the water was brought to the city and for the city-not for real estate fortunes or for the imperial city to incorporate hundreds of square miles of nearby valley. Instead this symbolizes a different California theme: the Arcadian delights of the untouched wilderness versus the mundane needs of the big city; inundating Hetch Hetchy was entirely an "act of desecration" for Muir, the Sierra Club, and the genteel academics in Stanford and Berkeley who populated the club.21 Muir had seen it and knew its awesome beauty, but after 1923 only the fish had the privilege: the valley disappeared when the O'Shaughnessy Dam raised a reservoir 86 feet high that drowned its cliffs, forests, and trout streams. John Muir's struggle to save Hetch Hetchy and his remorse at failing contributed to his death in 1914.

William Hammond Hall, the creator of Golden Gate Park who went on to be California's first state engineer and also the first person to think systematically about the state's water needs and its hydraulic architecture, was a charter member of the Sierra Club. He quickly came to understand that the immense capital outlay required for the hydraulic restructuring of California could only come from government, from the public treasury; private firms would not be able to do it. In 1891 Hall headed the California division of the U.S. Geological Survey and recommended Hetch Hetchy as the best site for a long-lasting source of water for San Francisco. Meanwhile this public servant spent his spare time investing in barren land before the delivery of water turned it into a real estate bonanza. Professor Charles Marx of Stanford, also a charter member of the Sierra Club, became chief spokesman for the aqueduct, and Woodrow Wilson, arch-progressive, signed the law authorizing the aqueduct in December 1913. J. B. Lippincott of Los Angeles notoriety was involved, too, after Mayor Phelan detailed him to investigate Hetch Hetchy's value for the city. It was equal-opportunity hypocrisy in search of water.

Unlike the Los Angeles oligarchy, however, Hall was about the only one who got rich off Hetch Hetchy. Mayor Phelan was a progressive Democrat who wanted munic.i.p.al water for the city. Lippincott chose not to buy land this time. San Francisco got a bond issue pa.s.sed in 19io, built the aqueduct for about $ioo million, took the water it needed when it was finished in 1934, and then sold the rest to independent communities on the peninsula down south to San Jose. Capable of watering 4 million people, this was not an aqueduct to lubricate a metastisizing city or build an oligarchy's future.22 If it were, San Francisco would have annexed Oakland as prelude to bringing the entire Bay Area and a good part of the peninsula under its aegis: then it might be something like Los Angeles. Still, the water remained under private control: for half a century the city got its water supply from the Spring Valley Water Works, which built several reservoirs in San Mateo County and had a monopoly on the delivery of water to the city. The city finally acquired it in 1929.23 Utopia or Empire?

Two decades after seeing Chinatown I read Donald Worster's Rivers ofEmpire, a definitive reinterpretation of western history that only makes the film seem more brilliant and telling. In this book, the "land of untrammeled freedom" inverts into "a land of authority and restraint, of cla.s.s and exploitation, and ultimately imperial power," with the empire resting on the federal government, managerial statecraft and expertise, state-developed technologies, and "abstracted Water, rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to raise food, fill pipes, and make money." The water is abstracted by dams, aqueducts, ca.n.a.ls, tunnels, concrete-lined ditches, and finally becomes a water of "acc.u.mulated expertise," state and technically controlled if still lifegiving water, separated from human beings by chain-link fences with signs warning people to "stay alive by staying out."24 Worster's account achieves the same shock of recognition that Jake Gittes got when a wall of rushing water splayed him against a chain-link fence which he barely clambered over before drowning, losing a new Florsheim shoe in the process.

For Worster, the American West is "a modern hydraulic society, " a social and techno-economic order "imposed for the purpose of mastering a difficult environment" and ruled by a power elite "based on the ownership of capital and expertise."25 It differs from Asian hydraulic societies not in any American preference for the private sector-the state is active and often dominant at all levels, with large mandarinates, otherwise known as federal, state, and local bureaucrats-or in being a federation of states rather than an empire, but in the state's role in creating an artificial water-driven environment and economy from which the private sector benefits, and the biggest beneficiaries are the biggest owners, first of all California agribusiness. The state dominates nature in the interest of private enterprise but otherwise leaves business alone-or should. Instead of seeing the West as a colony of the East, a venerable interpretation developed by great historians like Walter Prescott Webb and Bernard DeVoto, Worster sees the West as a new kind of empire, and after Pearl Harbor "a princ.i.p.al seat of the world-circling American Empire." But this is not a determinist account-Worster is a learned and thoughtful historian. As he rightly says, historical truth is not about strict cause and effect but rather "an imaginative grasp of subtly interacting relationships."26 Other scholars, like Richard Walker, call Worster's book "the most ambitious theoretical work on California's countryside ever undertaken" but declare him to be "magnificently wrong." He puts irrigation first in explaining the state's prodigious agricultural output, Walker writes, but it was really a laggard, trailing the spread of agriculture by half a century. Yet Walker's evidence doesn't seem to make his point; his own data show steep increases in harvested land that correspond to the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Hoover and Shasta dams, and anyway agrarian output is not really Worster's point. Walker also says urban capitalists were the ones sending rivers of investment into the fields, well before the federal government got involved.27 This is a more telling criticism, but it needn't detain us; he might be talking about William Mulholland and other Los Angeles elites who made little distinction between public and private-they might own the city water supply or they might not, depending on their interests.

Washington was, for most Americans and especially Californians, a distant abstraction. But sometimes it was useful: Mulholland and his friends, or cotton king Boswell, went to the federal government for the same reason that w.i.l.l.y Sutton robbed banks: that's where the money was. Worster presents a narrative and a theory of heavy state involvement in the remaking of the western environment, and as we will see, that involvement was even greater in the origins of western industry. However distant Washington may seem, strong state involvement has characterized this region more than any other. But the water empire of the West is controlled and driven by local leaders, and the broader American empire has little to do with irrigation in the West. Worster's a.n.a.lysis generalizes this water empire as a model for American involvement in the world but says little about the contribution of the West to the American role and position in the world; the West may be "a princ.i.p.al seat" of empire, but this empire is not made up of dams and public works, but of defense industries and military bases const.i.tuting an archipelago of armed force, which still falls well short of const.i.tuting the whole of American hegemony. With nary a dam built in the West you would still have the Atlanticist East, with a worldview originating in New England, taking guidance from England, looking after the whole and governing most of American diplomacy since 1900, and a Pacific-facing, western-directed expansionism that does not look after the whole but acc.u.mulates and subordinates the parts. But you wouldn't have Southern California-and that's what the empire of water built.

A New Form of State and Corporate Power.

Hydraulic societies do not have to be centrally concentrated and managed, as Holland's dense irrigation network ill.u.s.trates. In the early days, before Worster's empire, others offered an alternative vision of water and power in California, like the irrigation colony in San Bernardino that the Mormons founded, or the cooperative approach to urban planning and water delivery that the Ontario colony pioneered under the scientific tutelage of George Chaffee (not the Imperial Valley's George Chaffey). He and his a.s.sociates first built a capacious highway, 200 feet wide and running 8 miles into the foothills, planted magnificent trees on both sides, and ran a trolley car along the parkway in the middle of the road. Then they tapped the underground water table to irrigate orange groves, already carefully plotted, and banned the sale of alcohol to attract churchgoers. This Ontario model was copied widely, and for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, American government engineers erected a scale model of Ontario to exhibit Californian social innovation and public ingenuity.28 William Ellsworth Smythe, building on the ideas of John Wesley Powell, had a fully developed vision in The Conquest ofArid America (1900) for a social-democratic commonwealth in California based on the rational and planned application of water. Aridity was a blessing, not a curse, Smythe thought, because it enabled scientific control of the delivery of water to the earth; farmers did not have to pray for rain but could make their own. They would also have to cooperate with each other to irrigate the fields, and as this cooperation spread, so would social democracy.29 While Smythe was cogitating and Mulholland was reconnoitering the aqueduct, the federal government came into the picture under Theodore Roosevelt-who, in his first message to Congress in i9oi, opined that "in the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production." Water and power moguls like Mulholland found a new willing ear in Washington through Roosevelt's vision combining progressivism and conservation with a strong role for the central state. Roosevelt delivered exactly what the Los Angeles oligarchy wanted. In 1902 he got the National Reclamation Act through Congress, which funded 6oo civil engineers, gave Washington the primary responsibility for irrigation throughout the country, and began thinking about a network of dams and aqueducts that would, he said, "spread prosperity for centuries." The Interior Department could now lend taxpayers' dollars to irrigate homesteads up to 16o acres, a limit that remained in the law for decades but was rarely enforced in California. The new Reclamation Service, with maximum authority over the irrigation of public lands, quickly became a vast lever of central power to transform the West. Teddy Roosevelt traveled often to California and, like his cousin Franklin, believed strongly in ma.s.sive public works managed and financed by the federal government as a means to develop the West, and especially Southern California; he gave his personal imprimatur to the transfer of Owens Valley water to a newly flourishing Los Angeles.30 These measures were every bit as significant as the Homestead Act of 1862, perhaps more so: now the way was open to harness the great rivers of the West, like the Colorado or the Columbia (which drains a watershed the size of Texas, and carries ten times more water to the sea than the Colorado) '31 to the entire future development of the Pacific states-to channel and control the rich abundance of water in the Pacific Northwest and to deliver lifegiving water to the semi-arid California south. Thus water took its place alongside gold, silver, wheat, citrus, oil, electricity, and land (real estate) as a huge early boost to California and the West more generally, a series of incalculable "leading sectors" and multipliers of its comparative advantages. By 1900, however, it wasn't one leading sector following another (silver follows gold, wheat follows silver), but several combining together all at once.

Of these commodities, water came first-and still comes first. The Colorado River unites the center of the continent with the Pacific: it runs for 1,400 miles from the Continental Divide to the Gulf of California, a "unified drainage and watershed region" encompa.s.sing 260,000 square miles, including seven western states. Not as majestic as the Mississippi or the Columbia, muddy and dark most of the time, it found its American telos in giving life to Southern California, slaking its thirst and making it bloom. If the Colorado River were suddenly to run dry, millions of people would have to "evacuate most of Southern California and Arizona and a good portion of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming," in Marc Reisner's words. "The river system provides over half the water of greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix; it grows much of America's domestic production of fresh winter vegetables; it illuminates the neon city of Las Vegas, whose annual income is one-fourth the entire gross national product of Egypt-the only other place on earth where so many people are so helplessly dependent on one river's flow "32 The Owens River was one thing, giving Los Angeles ten times the water it needed, but bringing the Colorado to California was a worldhistorical undertaking: and that is what the federal government decided to do under Herbert Hoover. The Hoover Dam signified a new role for the federal government in grand public works, mostly in the West, something that President Hoover enthusiastically began but that Franklin Delano Roosevelt took hold of like no previous president; it also represented the beginning of a new a.s.semblage of western private power in the form of the six firms who built the dam.

In the same month as the stock market crash, President Hoover got his Stanford cla.s.smate, Ray Lyman Wilbur (by then secretary of the interior), to look over various applications (twenty-seven in all) for the water and power that the dam project would generate. Wilbur made sure his native California got more than its share: 36 percent of the water and power to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, 13 percent of the hydro-electric power to Los Angeles, another 15 percent of the electricity to Southern California Edison and some other companies and cities. Nevada and Arizona got 18 percent of the output, with rights to transfer what they didn't need to California. In other words the "greatest dam in human history" was going to deliver nearly all of its water and power to the empire of California-once a canyon was plugged with 4.5 billion cubic feet of concrete.33 This great dam was all about California in more ways than one. The low bid came from the "Six Companies," a consortium named for the Six Tongs of San Francisco's Chinatown. They included the little-known Bechtel Corporation; a fledgling cement contractor named Henry J. Kaiser; a firm run by Marriner Eccles and other Mormons (the Utah Construction Company, which had already built the Hetch Hetchy Dam); Morrison-Knudson from Boise (who brought in Frank Crowe, widely thought to be the best dam builder in the United States); the J. F. Shea Company of Portland, a tunnel and sewer builder; and the MacDonald and Kahn Company of San Francisco, which specialized in steel construction. All the firms profited from their work on the Hoover project, of course, but Bechtel and Kaiser, which had started off in cement and construction, got propelled upward to something like "corporate nation-states" by the end of World War II-not bad for two men who were paving roads in the late 192os.34 Kaiser had a progressive paternalism at heart and epitomized FDR's idea of the New Deal industrialist. His companies had mostly disappeared a generation later, but Bechtel remains today among the world's most powerful firms, global in scope and local in its politics-for example in Washington, where its officers routinely fill powerful cabinet positions. (Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz; John McCone got his early start with Bechtel and later ran the CIA during the height of the cold war.) These new captains of industry drove their workers mercilessly around the clock, with one of three shifts laboring at all times in miserable working conditions. Ultimately nearly a hundred workers died, the majority from heat prostration but many others from industrial accidents. Conditions improved when Roosevelt came in and Harold Ickes became secretary of the interior, but no unions ever operated at the dam; when Wobblies protested lousy wages, terrible working conditions, and living quarters unfit for animals in 1931, company thugs and federal marshals shooed them away. Starr is right to link this project to an "iron fist" of rightward-leaning laissez-faire industrialism, similar to the industrial cultures of Germany and j.a.pan, "a subtle triumph of the industrial Right."35 But Hoover Dam was just the first prominent example of the state-directed and state-funded industrialization of the Pacific states that would reach a crescendo during World War II, bringing the Far West much closer to the industrial policy of pre- and postwar j.a.pan and rather distant from "the natural workings of the market."

"Laissez-faire" was the cry when business was asked to pay taxes, or provide decent working conditions, or bargain with unions, or succ.u.mb to regulation by "the federal government," or attend to the environmental damage of which they were heedless. But it evaporated when that same government dangled construction contracts worth billions of dollars. Indeed, no company can possibly have benefited more from its connection to Washington than Bechtel, which later built U.S. military bases all over the world and erected cities in the Saudi desert. If the New Deal conformed more to the postwar German and j.a.panese model of corporate politics-business, labor, and the state working together, with a safety net for all-Bechtel resembled the prewar zaibatsu model: all-powerful, privately held conglomerates, shielded from public scrutiny, thriving on support from the state. Hoover Dam was the birthplace of a particular corporate propensity that was dominant in the Republican Party-condemning the federal government, taxes, unions, and regulations while fattening off public works and defense contracts. But this is a retrospective view; at the time the whole nation watched the great dam rise on the Colorado, and the novelty of this new form of state power made it difficult to separate right from left: the English novelist J. B. Priestley visited Hoover Dam and got "a first glimpse" of what collective planning can accomplish-"here is the soul of America under socialism."36 (Socialists like Herbert Hoover and John McCone, perhaps.) Los Angeles got its Colorado River water from a 242-mile aqueduct running from Lake Havasu (created by the Hoover Dam) through a complicated network of tunnels, ca.n.a.ls, covered conduits, siphons, dams, and reservoirs that took eight years to finish and kept thousands of people working during the Depression. In 1928 eleven cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties founded the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, and like Water and Power, the board was all-powerful. In the postwar period it was led with an iron hand by Joseph Jensen, a Getty Oil executive who was the chairman for two decades. He and the fifty other board members essentially held their positions for life, with the average age of each usually pushing seventy. Often called "Water Buffaloes" for their devotion to bending the rivers of the West to their interests, they operated outside of public scrutiny in spite of their extraordinary power-for example to impose property taxes throughout the region. They were L.A.'s mandarins, holding their positions forever as they move water this way and that. A century after the aqueduct the water and power story does not stop: the Southern California Metropolitan Water District finished the Eastside Reservoir in 1999: 8o miles outside of Los Angeles, it cost $2 billion. It is a 6-square-mile vat, "one of the largest bathtubs in human history" into which 1,700 Rose Bowls could go and, like Mulholland's aqueduct, designed to secure the region's future. But no oligarchy put this deal together-and it is so environmentally correct that even the environmentalists like it.37 "As Little as Possible"

Owens Valley water sits at the juncture of past and present, between a pristine Southern California Arcadia and the great, proliferating city that the aqueduct built. This is the founding story of Los Angeles, and it sits uneasily on the city's mind because of the means employed to get the water-the movers and shakers' favorite metaphor, "you need to break some eggs to make an omelet," doesn't quite work when one entire valley got sucked dry and the cooks ate so much of the omelet, in the form of the other valley (the San Fernando). The best historian of the episode, William Kahrl, sees in the events a merger of private interests with the greater public good of bringing water to the city; "no conspiracy was necessary; their objectives were the same." William Alexander McClung, however, suggests the problem was not just the means but the end-by bringing the water to L.A. and L.A. to the water, the act of irrigating the garden becomes a kind of fall, a "primal error"; it creates an artificial Arcadia, breaking with the natural past and putting Utopia beyond reach. Tampering with the natural environment to get water begets the complete reconfiguration of the earth (through endless real estate platting): to get there you need a car, which smothered the same environment in subdivisions and freeways (25o pounds of concrete per person), which befouls the other human essential, oxygen, air-the "cloudless days and gentle sunshine," "the glorious climate" in the words of a booster in 1890. We immediately imagine L.A.'s gift to the English language, smog, but McClung points out that Los Angeles had bad air and smoky inversions long before automobile exhaust befouled the skies; in 1912 an observer described "a graybrown veil hanging over the city," and Cabrillo named the Los Angeles Bay "de los fumos."38 Maybe there never was an Arcadian, crystal city-just a mudflat with bad air days. But millions of automobiles made it a lot worse, and the Owens Valley episode married corrupted means to the transformative end of the Los Angeles we see today-and whatever else we may say about it, it isn't Utopia and it isn't ever going to be.

To most people, from ordinary Americans to farmers to agribusiness moguls to communitarian idealists like William Smythe, irrigation was a G.o.dsend to be applauded. Smythe called the application of Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley "the most dramatic transformation ever seen in the United States," and irrigation in central and eastern Washington, he thought, liberated a rich volcanic soil. In the 193os Lewis Mumford called for a Columbia River Valley authority akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and President Roosevelt said he would like "to see the Columbia Basin devoted to the care of the 500,000 people represented in 'Grapes of Wrath"'; a generation later two scholars were still raving about how much Grand Coulee Dam had done for the Pacific Northwest. (Where in the literature is a critical a.n.a.lysis of irrigation in the Tennessee Valley or the Columbia Basin?) Others, like folk singer Woody Guthrie, showed that when it's about cheap electricity, popular opposition to dams melts away: the i,zoo-mile-long Columbia was "a river just goin' to waste," he sang in "Walking Columbia," while people need "houses and stuff to eat"; "folks need water and power dams." Perhaps another American essayist enjoys watching engineers open and close dams and wishes she could do it, too, but if so, I don't know who it is. Joan Didion longed to man the Project Operations Control Center in Sacramento and "put some over the hill" to Los Angeles-that is, put several million gallons over the Tehachapi Mountains, the highest pump-rise of any dam system in the world. Or she might push a b.u.t.ton and drain Quail: "I knew at that moment that I had missed the only vocation for which I had any instinctive affinity. I wanted to drain Quail myself"39 Richard Walker tosses down some kind of gauntlet to the critics of California's irrigated empire by ending his book on this note: the production system "has grown up big and strong and healthy in the summer sun, achieving a degree of bronzed, agrarian perfection that is hard to find anywhere else on earth in the three hundred years after the English revolution set loose the beast upon the globe." Worster's rivers of empire reemerge as Walker's "world's largest plumbing system": if it exploits workers, drains and poisons the waters, extinguishes plant and animal species, and transforms the landscape, how exactly is it different from any other form of advanced capitalism in our time, Walker asks-a capitalism "without restraint, without a cold war antagonist, without antipode or opposition in an age of market absolutism"? Have the rivers of empire done more to hurt the landscape than the highways we are all happy to use, not to mention the cities and suburbs? It is like William McClung's comment about Mike Davis's work: are we talking about Los Angeles, or are we talking about capitalism? If it's the latter, well, we have a different order of problem. For McClung, too, this is not a watery nightmare but "utopian planning" through hydraulic systems "on the vastest of scales," which "dictate the rhythm of life throughout California and the West"-but who's complaining?40 Chinatown is a film inextricably related to the time it was made, when a radical cultural abundance nurtured in the r96os burst forth, and when a failed war and an unfolding conspiracy named Watergate shook the nation (the name might suggest water and power in California, but it merely referred to an ugly hotel on the Potomac); Nixon resigned shortly after the film was released. This new cultural expression wanted to probe first causes, to get to the bottom of things, to unravel the ways and means of power, after hearing forever that "you may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't" (Noah Cross to Jake Gittes). It is to the everlasting credit of Roman Polanski that he refused to end the film well, a Hollywood happy ending; instead the denouement is brute, shocking testimony to power doing what it wants and getting away with it, and to the solace of amnesia: "Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown. "

Robert Towne's achievement was to render the telescoped history ofwater and power through Jake Gittes, the film's optic. He's up late at night following them everywhere, he's spying through binoculars, he's peering down from rooftops, he secretly photographs Mulwray with his "pretty in a cheap kind of way" girlfriend, he's bending over to examine puddles in the Los Angeles riverbed, he's idling for hours on a cliff until secretly diverted water cascades into the Pacific-the point is, he's going to nail the big boys. But throughout the film his vision is clouded, even occluded. At one point his sungla.s.ses are missing a lens, just as Mrs. Mulwray dies with a bullet that gouges out her eye. Gittes can't quite figure out what he's seeing, what he's uncovered, what still lies behind, and what it all means; he's back on the Chinatown police detail. The more he sees the more trouble he gets into, and in the end he can't do anything about what he learned ("as little as possible" he murmurs as his eyes take in Mrs. Mulwray's corpse-that's what the cops did in Chinatown). But he has seen enough to know in his bones that this is the way unrestrained power works.

Follow the money-or in this case the water-and power will be unveiled, perhaps even undone: that's Towne's principle. Do that and you'll get yourself killed, that's Polanski's principle. Towne's sensibility is entirely American: the truth will set us free-or at least put the crooks and murderers in jail. The sundappled sense of lost possibilities that inhabits the film (where did all the lemon groves go?) intimates that it did not have to happen that way. A holocaust survivor, Roman Polanski knows in his bones that Noah Cross was right-"You see, Mr. Gitts [sic], most people don't have to face the fact, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything. " The tension between Towne and Polanski is never resolved, it is just left hanging in the counterpoint of hope for the future (for California) and a tragic European sensibility of inevitable loss and unavoidable truth (power always wins). Chinatown is a metaphor for the history of Los Angeles, for American history, for the difference between a European and a Pacific sensibility, and for those who tried to say something new and illuminating in the 197os.

The rivers of empire and a glacier of corruption still cannot extinguish American optimism. California's attraction was seductive enough to draw Frederick Jackson Turner away from Cambridge to Pasadena, as we have seen, where he demonstrated that his frontier thesis could truly explain anything, including the state's phalanx of water and power. To him this was just another example of pioneer pluck, intrepid self-reliance, shiny optimism, and the progressive good sense of government and business joining hands for the commonweal: "The daring initiative and community spirit of the Pacific coast cities," he wrote in 1926, "notably Los Angeles and Seattle in developing harbours and water fronts, in bringing mountain water supplies and power by long distance electric transmission, and the Los Angeles suburbs in becoming the center of the moving picture production, are indications of the Western spirit in munic.i.p.al life."41 There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain pa.s.ses and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's necks.

-RAYMOND CHANDLER, opening lines of Red Wind.

he Monterey cypress groves mark the onset of aridity that characterizes Southern California, where lots of sunshine gets little enhancement from rain and the cypress gives way to eucalyptus and chaparral, and eventually to desert. These rare trees (Cupressus macrocarpa), haunting in their chalky gray limbs bent in warped, fanciful shapes before the ocean storms (Robert Louis Stevenson called them "ghosts fleeing before the wind") and reminiscent of similarly knotty and twisted trees all over tidal j.a.pan, exist naturally in only two magnificent settings-Point Lobos and nearby Pebble Beach. Hitchc.o.c.k chose this dramatic environment of "steep, rugged cliffs, sweeping views, and exotic flora" for several scenes in his 1940 movie, Rebecca (the only one of his films to win the Oscar for best picture). Landscape artist Francis McComas called Point Lobos "the greatest meeting of land and sea in the world."1 The gnarled, wind-kinked trees are the perfect, singular point of transition for the joining of two different Californias: the north and the south. These ghosts symbolize two dissimilar and often ant.i.thetical regions divided culturally, socially, politically, economically, and even religiously.

All human beings coming upon the Monterey peninsula for the first time have a right to say that it ranks among the great, beautiful sites in the world, thrilling in its exquisite interplay of earth, wind, tree, and ocean; nothing really prepares a person for its grandeur, instead we all discover it for ourselves. Here is J. Smeaton Chase, an English author, writing about the Pacific below Point Lobos and its serenity and power: "The sea was a splendor of deep Mediterranean blue, and broke in such dazzling freshness of white that one might have thought it had been that day created. How amazing it is, that the ancient ocean, with its age-long stain of cities and traffic, toil and blood, can still be so bright, so uncontaminated, so heavenly pure! It seems an intentional parable of Divinity, knowing and receiving all, evil as well as good, yet through some deathless principle itself remaining forever right, strong, and pure, the Unchanging Good."2 Southern California's encapsulated geography also encouraged people to think that it was a world unto itself. Just below the Big Sur fastness the coast runs almost due east from Point Conception and into the Tehachapi Mountains, a transverse range forming the northern limit of this geographical unit and the lower boundary of the Great Central Valley. The Pacific itself changes: it is warmer, calmer, you can even swim in it. The coast then tapers diagonally down to Los Angeles, and by the time you get there you are east of Reno, Nevada. The border with Mexico is the southern extremity, and to the east the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains protect this great basin from the desert heat (if not its winds). If California was thought to be an island for centuries, Southern California is "an island on the land," in Helen Hunt Jackson's famous rendering; geography and climate (if not culture or human direction) lead it resolutely to face West, toward the Pacific, and the ocean returns the favor by sending cooling winds across the land, a gift of "airconditioned equability" that bequeathed "a freak of nature-a cool and semimoist desert." Here is a Mediterranean coast without humid summers or malarial mosquitos, "the fertility of Egypt without its fellaheen; the fruits and wild flowers of Sicily without its lazzaroni ... the sunshine of Persia without its oppressions."3 Arcadia, Utopia, or Nightmare?

"Anglophone Los Angeles sought to reconcile two contradictory visions of ideal s.p.a.ce and place: an acquired Arcadia, a found natural paradise; and an invented Utopia, an empty s.p.a.ce inviting development." This is William Alexander McClung, from his recent book, Landscapes of Desire. It is quite a good book, but its theme is not only centuries old in California mythology, but as American as apple pie. He is particularly good at showing how the critical literature that abounds in the library draws on Arcadian mythologies about a lost past-usually a quite recent past-that never really existed. Southern California's history is wrapped up in episodes of original sin, m.u.f.fed chances, evil deeds, lost Edenic moments. Its Utopias lie waiting in the future, in the recovery of lost innocence-a "desperately sought" future in McClung's words, when everything will be put right. As for the nightmare so many others see in the remains of the Los Angeles day, preeminently Mike Davis, McClung asks if this is a critique of the city or a critique of modern capitalism?

Do people complain about New York or Chicago the way they do about Los Angeles? Of course not: what was Chicago's Arcadian past? New York's Utopian future? People are comfortable with a materialist explanation for Chicago, the city with big shoulders, but that will never do in L.A. The more telling comparison is San Francisco: a long list of adjectives often precedes its name, but they aren't tropes of Arcadia or Utopia-instead it's a city where you leave your heart. But in Southern California this is the discourse that never dies: it is their version of the end of the frontier. Just like Turner, their fond hopes and dreams are confounded time and again by infernal machines grinding Eden under and calling it progress, technologies that seduce them in the moment of their newness, until they find out that for every new world gained another, more precious one, has been lost. It is a way of looking back to compensate for an inability to resist the onslaught of the new; it is a way of facing East, back across the mythologies of American history, that avoids the truly new possibilities and perils of the Pacific and the influx of Pacific peoples who have always crowded the state with enormous drive and talent, but who do not fit any comfortable narrative. Southern California recuperates and preserves the original garden myth of the American people, perhaps because letting it go leaves us adrift in a new world all too resistant to our hopes and dreams.

City of Angels, City of Consumers.

California's most productive city, Los Angeles, had a very "late" arrival as an American city, in the i88os. When it was founded in 1781 it was a nondescript mudflat, and it was "still a mere village" to David Starr Jordan in 1879, a mostly Mexican town surrounded by a desert of cactus and sagebrush. The first American census in 1850 located only 8,329 Angelenos, "half of whom were Indian and most ofwhom were illiterate." People bathed in open ditches when they weren't relieving themselves in the same place. It was a wild frontier town with a murder rate like L.A.'s today: about one murder for each day in 1850. Not much changed in the next couple of decades, until 1871 when an orgy of mob violence against local Chinese shocked the proper whites into doing something about the murderous public sphere. Upwards of a thousand whites cascaded into Chinatown, beating, shooting, and lynching any Chinese they found; victims dangled by the neck from gateways, awnings, and thrown-together gallows; the mob looted homes, stores, even the pockets of lynched men. Nineteen were hanged (the rope broke on one, so he was strung up again), and most were tortured first. A grand jury indicted i5o men but sentenced only 6 to jail, and soon they were free-after all, members of the police force were at the head of the mob. Finally by the i88os Los Angeles established a modic.u.m of law and order and was poised to become what it is, a city that does in ten years what other cities do in a lifetime. It grew by 500 percent in that decade, reaching a population of 5o,ooo by 1889, when more than 130,000 people lived in Southern California, most of them arriving after the Santa Fe railway reached L.A. in 1885. By 1910 the city had nearly 320,000 residents-already embarking on the American dream that would later encompa.s.s the entire century: ma.s.s production and ma.s.s consumption.4 The Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific railways competed for pa.s.sengers, touching off a rate war that at one point dropped the fare from Kansas City to L.A. to $5; prices went up a bit, but for years it was common to get a $25 or $30 fare from Chicago or St. Louis. Los Angeles didn't invent real estate boosters-they followed the westering frontier like flocks of geese-but it took boosterism to an art form, defining its built landscape more than any other city. The first boom took the mudflat and built America's newest metropolis. Total real estate sales in L.A. the year the railroad arrived were about Si million, $3 million a year later, and $12 million by the middle of 1887: "Developers platted dozens of new towns ... Riverside beginning in 1886, Hollywood in 1887, then Inglewood, Redondo Beach, Long Beach"; by the time Walter Nugent is done listing them (throw in Claremont, Glendale, Burbank, and Ontario), an entire physiognomy of metropolitan Los Angeles materialized overnight. Touts sold home lots in restaurants, saloons, at curbsides, and even in churches (a newly arrived easterner went to services at a Methodist church, and when the preacher finished his sermon he sold the man a lot in a new subdivision); later on, ducks, midgets, and giants walked the streets with sandwich signs trumpeting new homes, giving L.A. its welldeserved reputation: "a great circus without a tent." Los Angeles "did not grow," McClung wrote, "as sell itself into existence." The great green hope of every homeowner, then as now, was to have his own detached house, a few citrus trees, and to watch his property appreciate-preferably take off like a rocket. L.A. paid off on both propositions more often than not, and especially on the promise of "my home": by 1950 two-thirds of all dwelling units were detached, compared to less than 30 percent in New York and Chicago.'

The budding elite of Los Angeles arose through speculation in land. Henry Edwards Huntington became a billionaire in contemporary dollars (our dollars) by building a state-of-the-art trolley car system for the city, with the help of Frank J. Sprague, an a.s.sistant to Thomas Edison. The Pacific Electric Railway Company was sparkling new and remarkably convenient, and as it spread through the valley around the turn of the century (ultimately with more than i,ooo miles of track), it created the urban sprawl that so many subsequently blamed on the automobile, linking forty-two incorporated cities within a thirty-five-mile radius of Los Angeles-it brought L.A. to the valley, too. The trolleys might run at a loss now and then, but that wasn't the point: Huntington and his oligarchic friends bought up undeveloped real estate at rock bottom prices, extended a new trolley line connecting virgin territory to the downtown, named the new town (Newport, Venice, Redondo Beach), plumped the new home plots in the pages of the Times, and reaped windfall profits. His Huntington Land and Improvement Company bought up much of the western San Gabriel Valley, he pushed the Red Line through it and then subdivided and sold thousands of land parcels. By 1910 some fifty communities in four counties were served by the railroad, and Huntington was among the richest men in America.6 The city's first attraction, widely promoted by the Santa Fe line, was climate and its supposed tonic effect on health. Tuberculosis, arthritis, depression, consumption, rheumatism, lumbago, a bad sacroiliac, a bent frame, and a host of other ill-understood chronic illnesses could be washed away in the California sunshine. So the early population was unusually elderly: the old and infirm seeking the climate, the air, and the sunshine. It worked for many but not for all, and anyway, no one lives forever: so the bright dawn of Southern California's modern history also had the aura of the mortuary, prelude to Forest Lawn with its microphones to talk to the dear departed, drive-in funeral homes with the late beloved ensconced in a window, and the apotheosis of Southern California morbidity, the pet cemetery. "In Los Angeles during these years, death seemed everywhere, and a mood of death, strange and sinister, like flowers rotting from too much sunshine, remained with the city." 7 Living Better with Petroleum.

Just as the i88os population boom tapered off momentarily, another boom came along: not real estate, but the gusher of oil that Edward Doheny found on the corner of Glendale Boulevard and West Second Street, just in time to fuel the automobiles that would soon saturate L.A. like no other city. Doheny just found it, too; you didn't have to be a crack geologist or a fearless wildcatter when sticky petroleum oozed out of the surface soil. Indians had used it for centuries to waterproof canoes, and federal surveys in the i85os located hundreds of exposures or "tar springs" in Southern California. The son of an Irish immigrant fleeing the potato famine, Doheny was a mule driver and singing waiter before landing in L.A. almost penniless in 1892. One day he peered out his boarding house window and noticed Mexicans ferrying chunks of tar around. So he and a partner leased a promising lot, got out their picks and shovels, drove a shaft i5o feet into the ground, and with the sharpened tip of a eucalyptus log, detonated one of America's grandest gushers. Within a decade he controlled nearly all of California's oil production.'

By the turn of the nineteenth century some 2,300 wells spouted over 9 million barrels a year and California was the leading oil producer in the world. Most of it was used for home and business fuel until Henry Ford made the personal automobile ubiquitous; as early as 19o5, L.A. had more cars than any other big city, riding on 350 miles of graded streets. With huge strikes at Maricopa (19io), Huntington Beach (1920), and the Signal Hill bonanza in Long Beach (1921), Southern California inaugurated the ma.s.s automobile age with an ocean of fuel at the ready. It seems almost forgotten that California was the biggest oil producer a century ago and the leading American producer in the mid-192os (263 million barrels in 1923), even though oil wells still litter the landscape in Long Beach. Tony Beverly Hills went from lima beans to oil speculation (a string of dry wells, but so what, this was California; the investors soon subdivided the bean fields and put up mansions for the wealthy).

In most Americans' minds Spindletop (1901), Tulsa, and West Texas still stand for the oil boom of this era (1892 into the 193os), partly because Texas and Oklahoma took so long to diversify their economies, and after the East Texas boom in 1931 dethroned California as the leading producer, the latter never again boomed quite like it once did. But oil had a differential effect on these states: it got them off coal very quickly and very early compared to other places; the big industrial countries relied on coal for more than a century before World War II, reducing their dependence only as oceans of Middle Eastern oil sloshed into world markets (global usage of oil outstripped coal only around 1960). But unlike Texas, where oil supplemented cotton and thus deepened its dependency on primary products, in California oil was just another boom industry, dovetailing with innovations across several fronts. Oil, natural gas, and hydroelectricity were the modern alternatives to coalthey're generally much cheaper and much cleaner-and California got all of them very early. Its peak coal usage came in 1900, soon it was using less than a half-ton a year per capita compared to the nation's 5.3 tons, and by 1925 coal made up less than 5 percent of its energy regime and never again went higher. The newness of the oil industry also meant that California had the most technologically advanced facilities.9 The intersection of Court and Toluca streets in Los Angeles, circa 19oo. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Living Even Better with Electricity.

California moved quickly toward an all-electric life that matched its pioneering of a gasoline-based modern culture, cascading forward from Edison's invention of the lightbulb in 1879. Electricity gives pause to even the most resolute and determined environmentalist or naturalist because it is so clean and so invisible. You can't see it unless it sparks; you can't smell it unless something's wrong; you can't hear it unless it shorts out; you can generate it naturally, with wind or falling water; and it powers almost anything. California's lack of a settled population hooked onto some earlier form of energy (like coal, which still powered furnaces in nearly 6o percent of American homes in 1940) made adopting this new-new technology easy-and it just happened to bring forth huge advances in productivity. Nationally it increased worker productivity in the 192os by 22 percent, and from 1910 (when electrification was fairly common in business firms) to 194o American productivity grew 300 percent. The Westinghouse power line from Niagara Falls to Buffalo is often said to be the first great delivery system, but it was preceded by an ii,ooo-volt line from Livermore to Sacramento, opened in 1895. By the time the lights went on in Buffalo, Sacramento residents had nearly 13,000 incandescent lamps and 35 electric streetcars. By 1923 California had the highest density in the nation of 220,000-,110,000-, and 55,ooo-volt transmission lines. If in 1895 L.A. was merely the third-ranking city in telephones per capita, by 1911 it ranked first-not in the nation, but in the world (New York was sixth). By 1930 California produced io percent of the nation's hydroelectricity for 3.5 percent of its population, it consumed this clean energy at 2.5 times the national rate, and it got fully 83 percent of this electricity from falling water.10 Because California remained dependent on eastern industry until World War II, much of the state's prodigious electric capacity was used for homes, farms, cities, and novel industries. Nearly 8o percent of homes were wired for electricity by 1920, compared to 35 percent in the rest of the country (and less than 1o percent for the nation's farms). California boosters immediately grasped its potential to advertise contemporary high-tech living; electricity ran all the 192os goodies in department store windows that made housework a breeze-it kept baby's milk warm and cow's milk cold; it soothed granny's lumbago with heating pads and cooled grandpa's rocker with fans; it warmed the bath water and burned waffles; for a time it ran your car; it even curled your hair (24 percent of California homes had curling irons in 1925), washed your clothes (36 percent had a washing machine by 1925, compared to 16 percent in the country), and given the mild climate, you could even heat your home with it-and many did. The Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915 was festooned with the latest lighting technology. Searchlights shot great white spires into the sky, to symbolize through illumination "a measure of the traditions of both the Orient and the Occident." Oriental blue was a particular hit, with nighttime illumination bringing out the Celestials' "absolute values." Twenty years later Stanford's longstanding joint research with the electric power industry yielded perhaps the most magical electricity of all: the microwave.11 What distinguished California was its "lateness"-or its perfect timing so that every new technology could instantly be applied or adapted without disrupting previous investments, inventory, installations, and existing energy sources and technologies, yielding world-beating gains in productivity. Gas lines had barely been strung in the state when electricity came along. Riverine, ca.n.a.l, and horse-and-buggy routes were nonexistent or served such a small population that railroads, electric trolleys (the Red Line), and above all automobiles could quickly replace them. By 19io no state could match California in its use of these modern conveyances or in its almost instant electrification. This critical source of cheap energy and the discovery of huge pools of oil fueled the state's very rapid growth up to the Depression. Gasoline and electricity produced a worldwide revolution, but they produced it first in California, where streetcars and automobiles shaped a dispersed, suburban pattern of living in the 192os, two decades before the 1939 New York World's Fair introduced the concept of "suburb," and three decades before it became a national pattern. Southern California showed the future to the country and to the world after 1920, epitomizing the quality that would turn out to be America's greatest strength: what Victoria de Grazia called its "Market Empire," that is, "the rise of a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium."12 Sacramento's electric extravaganza. Brochure for the Sacramento Electrical Carnival, 1895. Sacramento Archives and Museum.

Pioneering Suburban Life.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Southern California combined an expanding greensward of lovely and affordable land with millions of productive new immigrants and the invention that would remake the physiognomy of the nation and American individuality-my car, my s.p.a.ce. By the time of the 1929 crash, Southern Californians had reached levels of home and automobile ownership that most other parts of the country would not match until the 195os, and that Europe and j.a.pan would not reach until the 196os and 1970s. All across the country, but especially in Southern California, the old Puritan-republican creed met its match in what Warren Susman called the American "culture of abundance."13 Spending and consuming (increasingly on credit) outstripped stern rect.i.tude, self-restraint, moral character, and saving: and the primary consumer durable was a private, personal abode that traveled, in which you could increasingly do almost anything you wanted.

By World War I, Los Angeles had everything necessary for a prolonged boom: cheap water, cheap energy, abundant land, infant industries (autos, films), and new technologies (aircraft, radio): it just needed people. We saw earlier the spectacle of Chicago exploding into the dynamo of the prairies, almost overnight. Los Angeles and its surrounding counties and towns have done that four or five times-in the i88os; 1900-29; the postwar boom after 1945; and the post-1965 immigration boom that is still ongoing, punctuated by a downturn after the cold war ended; and then another boom starting around 1995. Its population quadrupled in the i88os, doubled in the 189os, and tripled again in the succeeding decade, to a 1910 figure of 319,000. But that was mere prelude to the real boom; n.o.body had seen anything like it. Between 1910 and 1930 the American population grew by a lot-one-third, a 33.5 percent increase. New York's population doubled, Chicago's and Philadelphia's nearly did, and San Francisco's tripled. Other Pacific cities like Seattle and Portland grew at 16 or 17 percent, less than the national average. But in those same two decades the population of Los Angeles exploded to 2,319,000, a 727 percent increase. Small towns in 1910, like Glendale (population 2,700), grew to 63,000 by 1930. Southern California had major population upsurges every couple of decades, with peaks in 1887, 19o6, 1923, and of course the war years; McWilliams likened it to a "continuous boom" punctuated by major explosions. During the Depression several large American cities lost population, and only two cities grew by double-digit rates during the decade of the 1930s: Los Angeles and Denver.14 Another great migration, this time by car more than by train, brought 2 million new Californians-often in "rattletrap automobiles, their fenders tied with string, and curtains flapping in the breeze, loaded with babies, bedding, bundles," in Mildred Adams's words. More than half of the newcomers wound up in Los Angeles County, and more than a third settled in the city. The aqueduct, we remember, had enough water for 2 million people; the city had 200,000 when Mulholland got the idea and nearly 1.5 million by 1930. The city's population doubled in five years from 1920 to 1925; real estate contractors not only built prodigiously for the new migrants but subdivided the city in such a manic way that 7 million people could live there, if all the lots were built and sold. From 1921 to 1928 5o,ooo acres were chopped up into 3,233 subdivisions and 246,612 building lots. People bought their future, and the future uncannily kept paying them back: land values in downtown Los Angeles rose Boo percent in the twenty years after 1907. Near the end of the decade Los Angeles had almost 400,000 separate residences, a third of them occupied by the owner, giving it a physiognomy unlike any other city. Smalltown streets and neighborhoods stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction, and they called it a city. A fine observer named Bruce Bliven said that this booming growth "creates an easy optimism, a lazy prosperity which dominates people's lives. Anything seems possible; the future is yours, and the past?-there isn't any." It sounds like a cliche circa 1955, but the year was 1927 giving Bliven a prescience not unlike the city itself, which was showing the rest of the country its future, what the "American dream" of my home and my car would look like-"a melting-pot in which the civilization of the future may be seen, bubbling darkly up in a foreshadowing brew," in his words.15 By 193o Los Angeles' population density, measuring the city against the outlying towns, was 3 to i. New York's was 26 to i, San Francisco's 30 to i. At the same time 88 percent of all new retail businesses were locating in suburbs. Wags liked to say that Los Angeles built Long Island without Manhattan, but Fogelson argued frankly that the dispersed quality of the city and its early adoption of the suburban model (he dates it from 1887) was a reaction against big city life, especially a city like Chicago with "teeming tenements and crowded ghettoes" of East European and black residents. The residential suburb was "s.p.a.cious, affluent, clean, decent, permanent, predictable, and h.o.m.ogeneous," whereas the industrial metropolis "was the receptacle for all European evils and the source of all American sins." Amid a mult.i.tude of suburbs, Palos Verdes was the quintessential model. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles H. Cheney, it had Boo acres ofparkland, expensive homes on ocean view sites, flowing residential streets, a few carefully circ.u.mscribed commercial areas, in short, "a garden suburb"-Arcadia. The less wealthy found suburbs of a lesser kind, but still on the model of a garden town, pursuing a semi-rural communality that recalled the midwestern farm roots of so much of the population, re-created and updated in a suburban setting (homesteaders once removed to Los Angeles). The dispersed city was a quilt of many squares, each a self-contained community reached by carand in the eyes of its residents, not a city at all. Even industry was suburban: films in Hollywood, airplanes along the coast, autos and tires in the lowlands. But in this respect and many others, L.A.'s sprawl was pioneering; the city was zoned beginning in 1909, very early by American standards, and its undulating distention, well advanced by the 1920s, antic.i.p.ated the malling of America and the spread of "edge cities" in the late twentieth century, just as intricately planned suburbs like Palos Verdes Estates antic.i.p.ated-in 1921the ubiquitous gated communities of our time. In the early decades, though, many thought Palos Verdes was the jewel in a crown of suburbs, meeting Lewis Mumford's ideal of a garden metropolis "with small, balanced communities serving as stars in a metropolitan constellation."16 Los Angeles did not pioneer ma.s.s production and ma.s.s consumption, as historians Lizabeth Cohen and William Leach have shown, but it took this endeavor-"a vision of the good life" defined by ever more buying-and deepened it beyond anything yet imagined, projecting it to the country both as an urbane cityscape to visit and the primary locus of Hollywood films. It wasn't hard work to transform an ahistorical people into a ritual clamoring for the new, the latest and best, the new and improved, stretching into a consumptive paradise called the future. Here was a vision of an affluent, comfortable, exciting life, open to a flatlander from Iowa or anyone else; Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and a couple of other cities defined a new urban culture that became synonymous with "the heart of American life."17 Frugal farmers accustomed to saving every penny got to L.A. and gave themselves over to easy credit: department store charge cards, Chevies on the installment plan, a bank loan for the home-"the future" under comprehensive mortgage, ultimately creating the early twenty-first-century peculiarity of an entire nation with negative savings, maxed-out credit cards, and an economy two-thirds dependent on consumer spending-and spending, and more spending. Department stores emerged in every city, large and medium, to transform "dry goods" into an American dream, to house the surfeit of things of all types under one roof thus to mesmerize the consu